Life's Longevity
by Andrea Guinn
It stared at me with a biting zeal.
“Well,” my mother chirped, plucking the crumbs of lint form
her skirt with the pretense of languor, “this is it. Eighteen Birch
Lane.”
Smooth and calculated and staring. Something resembling
deadness hovered above its brick lining, violently uninviting. But it
wasn’t just out house, every building on the street sprung from its
lush, suburban lawn with a numbness that mirrored my own.
“Holden, Adeline,” she drug on, splendidly driving the wiry
stumps of her high heels into the walkway. “carry in the rest of the
luggage, will you.” I suddenly remembered how especially irritated her
habit of molding questions into comments makes me: my mother, chic and
elegant, with all her grammatical sovereignty.
The sixteen years of my life had been sporadically divided
amongst ten homes and eight differing alma maters, from the home of the
soaring eagles to backdrop of a savagely misportrayed Indian chieftain.
“You heard mom, Adie,” Holden paternally scolded. “Stop
pouting and help me here.”
“Pipe down. Just because Dad’s--.”
Dead. Almost seven months ago he had spilled the remnants
of his young life, but my throat still shriveled and staggered dryly at
the thought of the words.
“Look, you’re not the man of the house yet. I’m coming.”
“Beep! beep! beep!”
My seven o’clock alarm howled at me through the morning
grogginess. Instinctively I groped for the snooze button as a faint
remembrance crept into the recesses of my tired head.
I as due at the school in half an hour, awaiting my adoption
as a ram.
I hastily smoothed over my panic and scared for one of the
outfits that had been neatly tucked away in my suitcase since last week,
then lurched across the empty halls and into the kitchen to devour what
was left of our breakfast. With hurried gulps I swallowed two blueberry
muffins like air, drinking breathes of musty-scented air between bites.
At the school, my feet plunked aimlessly across the infinite
high school halls until Room 218, my first period Advanced Pre-Calc,
thrust its brute face between me and my confusion. I didn’t enter
before feeling the small plastic pricks of brail on the door, always
having been curious as to why school’s found it necessary to put brail
on every classroom door.
I playfully imagined a blind mind squirming his way through
the halls towards his Pre-Calculus block, dragging his steady hand
across every inch of the brick halls. Then I imagined my self as the
man, blind through my own unfamiliarity to the school, and the smile
that crept its way towards my pale face slowly withered as it plunged to
my feet.
“Welcome.” the teacher Ted started over the sounding bell.
I fell into my chair silently and immediately shivered at the crowed of
eyes which prodded me insistently
And with that the enclosed me in a foreign world of numbers
at symbols that pushed sorely t my head. Number after number flung its
body into my head, and before class had ended I was already submerged in
a chilly pool of mathematics struggling for air.
The ticking of the clock raced towards the end of my life
with its tiny, red arms outstretched in laugher, finally bellowing in a
low, resounding ring.
A sweeping tide of buried book bags freed me from their
prodding grips, and I silently slithered my way from sign to sign before
reluctantly entering Room 318.
At last an air of logic cleansed my exhaustion, as posters
of adjectives and similes welcome me with blanketing rationale: a
weaponry of words passed its way unto my mind.
The flickering candle of my soul ignited as my eyes locked
with what had to have been the most poetic boy I’d ever rested my eyes
on. He floated on his seat, gleaming and ordained with dark, curly
wisps swinging loosely from a mountain of shaggy hair. The words that
once filled my heart left like butterflies, leaving me as stupid and
naked as a newborn baby. The bell rang in tones of fading opportunity
and I quickly stole a seat next to his.
“You must be Adeline,” the teacher confidently pressed of
me. “I’m Missus Rosenberg. You came at just the right time. We’ve
just finished The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath.” She handed me a
numbered book and some assignment papers for the keeping. “Are you
familiar with it?”
Sylvia nested in my heart with an unparalleled reverence.
“Yes,” I mumbled disinterestedly.
“Good. Perhaps you can join us in discussion.”
Quietness stumbled form desk to desk.
“What do you think the author was suggesting in her
ending?” Her words spilled from her mouth like silence over the class,
leaving one girl to poke restlessly through its weeds. Her pursed lips
slowly rose to reveal two sets of pearly white rectangles, perfectly
aligned tooth after tooth.
“I think its uplifting. Esther had the power to control her
madness the whole time. And she does.” My unspoken thoughts clashed
with hers like swords drawn to kill. “Everything’s curable.”
A warm blush swelled in the teacher’s plump cheeks and hung
form her fat like victory.
“No,” the poet interrupted. “Not, that not it at all.”
“Explain please, Aidan.”
Even his name tasted sweet on the tongue.
“Well, I don’t think she intended it to be so uplifting.
She destroys hopeful walls when Esther suggests the bell jar could
descend again.”
My eyes must have absorbed the luster of his words, because
Missus Rosenberg speedily called on me.”
“I agree with him,” my voice quivered. “I think mental
instability is a seed sewn into all our souls, and Sylvia Plath plays on
his to suggest some human characters are untamable.”
A nervous silence clouded the room.
“We can’t be in control of everything.”
The lunch bell shrieked as Mrs. Rosenberg handed out
instructions of an upcoming research paper.
“Due next Wednesday,” she hollered over the resounding cry
of the bell.
Only I couldn’t eat. The food stared at me with malice and
my throat snapped shut at the sight of it. I watched countless students
inhale their meals like busy worker ants, small and empty and perfect
similar to a million others.
My next two classes progressed through me like nothing,
leaving only the blank gawk of a busy chalkboard imprinted in my
memory. Minutes melted into hours, hours into days, and soon a week had
dragged its corpse across the field of my calendar.
I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat.
I hadn’t even started my research paper: I couldn’t do
school work. The words and numbers jumped at my eyes and strangled my
brain, and the resulting exhaustion further distorted my focus with
every weighty tick of the clock.
Each night it races towards the mocking tiredness of
tomorrow.
Beginning my paper the blank contaminated my thoughts with
emptiness, and my words were like water into water as they left my pen.
I felt my grades sliding slowly downward like sand through a
sieve, each grain holding a piece of mea s it escaped my grasp.
Broken, shattered pieces of me lined the ground, escaping
into a sea of conformity across the horizons of an endless beach.
Most of all, I felt my individuality leaking form me in
slow, painful drips from my heart.
I wanted more than anything to sink into an calm slumber, to
shield my thoughts with closed lids. But hour after hour slowly ticked
by through the dancing hands of the clock, and thought after thought
tortured my brain with their callusing stabs.
Since my father’s death I hadn’t been able to recognize
people as people. Everybody sopped in a pool of inescapable conformity
that only I could see, and like a cult it gradually beckoned me hither
into its darkness. The last beat of my heart had sounded at age
sixteen, but the throbs continued to surge forward with a falseness that
mocked my own metaphorical death.
Coldness swept my face as a dragged the weights of my feet
from the bed and scurried through the medicine cabinet in the bathroom.
Carefully, I plucked every aspirin from the tinted container, and
precisely lined them on the smooth surface of the counter.
I thought it perfectly becoming that a pill which ought to
restore health in me would become the avenue of my ruin.
With an aching sigh I swallowed every tablet like little
army men, exact and unfeeling. The container echoed hollowly onto the
hard floor as my lids heavily closed around my tired eyes.
The flash of a cherry light stabbed my eyes and continued
further onto my abdomen, which felt mushy and numb from the stabs. A
scream swelled in the pit of my throat but was gently massaged away by
the face of my father, which drifted lovingly above me as I sped at
hyper-speeds through the dead of the night. -----
“Adie,” a soft whisper cried.
I felt the pinch of a needle as it fed my veins from a pouch
of transparent liquid hanging ghostly form my bedpost.
“Adie.”
“Where am I?”
I arouse to the pinched face of my mother staring devotedly
into mine. For the first time I watched as tears sloshed form her eyes
and fell like small beads onto my cheeks.
Life had once again been breathed into the world, and it
took my mother’s face to show me the vivid colors of my folly.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Shhh.”
Four days later I was well enough only to be carted into the
mental ward at Stonewall, where I would discard my television and
visiting privileges for a chance to be free again, and like a young bird
I gladly spread my wings in hope of flight.
A new power in my heart pressed warmly at my soul, and the
faces of people and stillness of life no longer pierced through
tenderly. The gentle nurse absorbed my every move, and graphed in her
mind my transformation, which occasionally reflected itself in the dark
bulbs of her eyes. The longevity of my stay finally slapped the shore
of my liberty less than a month from the incident, and the remnants of
medicine and bitterness had at last purged their way from my stomach.
With the air of a surrogate mother, she hovered over me.
“You know, Adeline,” she began. Her words left the slender
opening of her mouth like molasses. “Happiness is something we’ll never
stop fighting for.”
I never answered, but nodded with an engaging gratitude as
she slipped back into the numbness of work.
The car rolled slowly towards freedom suspending my mother
and I in sulky renewal. Spring blossomed from every corner of the
earth, the flowers freshly painted and plucking themselves. The green
grass spread its arms to me like newly liberated territory.
Topics for my research paper blossomed in every budding
flower. Life no longer stank of a stifling longevity, and when it would
one day begin, I had the courage to fight empty-handed.
Picking up the phone, I fingered Aidan’s number.